13 Answers
13

I have successfully used several different techniques to improve the way Ubuntu uses the storage device, whether that be solid state or traditional drive.

For SSD's you are looking to minimise the number of times the drive is written too, as reads should not add wear to the drive.

1) Manage the swap file

If you do not hibernate your computer and you have ample RAM memory to run all your applications, then in theory you do not need a swap partition.

If you have a mix of SSD and hard drives, place your swap partition on the hard drives only.

2) No Writes for Read Timestamps (suitable for SSD's and hard drives)

Mounting your partitions with the options noatime and nodiratime will stop timestamp writes when you read files and folders. These timestamp writes are not generally required unless you use a local mail server client such as mutt.

Edit your /etc/fstab configuration file (carefully - take a backup to be sure as breaking your fstab configuration can prevent you system from working):

cp /etc/fstab ~/fstab-backup
gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

Edit the mounting options for your partitions by adding the text noatime and nodiratime to the lines defining your root (/) and other partitions if you have them (/home) - Note: if you have a /home partition, start with that just changing that partition if you are concerned about breaking something

Assuming that you are not running a mission critical product server, most people do not look at logs should something go wrong (especially as serious errors are rare for most Ubuntu users). Therefore you can configure Ubuntu so all logs get written to RAM memory rather than the SSD.

Note: only make the following changes when you have installed all software you are going to use (especially things like Apache web server), otherwise you may experience some issues with missing directories in /var/log

Nice find, JR0cket. I used to contribute to Ubuntu-eee, before it became EasyPeasy. Ramvi was a gentleman. wiki.geteasypeasy.com/…
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ScaineFeb 3 '11 at 22:18

6

About the last bit for logs and stuff, the tmpfs lines are commented, so why would adding those lines make any difference? Do we need to add it uncommented?
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OxwiviSep 1 '11 at 17:50

8

I can understand if this is meant to improve speed, but most of what you wrote seems intended to improve SSD life. Isn't it the case that with modern SSDs these improvements are pointless? And at the expense of more RAM usage! (for example, see the link given in this other answer)
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Chan-Ho SuhApr 23 '12 at 23:30

4

There's no need for 2). relatime does the job of preventing writes very well and it's been active by default since kernel 2.6.30.
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Mihai CapotăNov 21 '12 at 14:02

2

Just to add to @MihaiCapotă's comment there is a Server Fault answer with more details on why noatime is not needed.
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CasJan 8 '13 at 12:20

SSD Life

Generally I wouldn't bother - the worries about SSD life are overblown. You can read this detailed article about why you really shouldn't worry. In short the circuitry inside modern SSDs manages wear-levelling for you, and they know how to do it far better than you.

In the article is a calculation of the life of an SSD that is receiving writes at a continuous rate of 80M/s. The life is 51 years. That is based on 2007 technology - SSD life will be longer now. And you almost certainly don't write to your SSD at 80M/s 24 hours a day.

SSD Performance

However performance degradation over time can be a problem, and TRIM is the solution. There are two options

SSDs store data in flash memory cells that are grouped into pages, with the pages (typically 4 kB each) grouped together into blocks (typically 128 pages per block, totaling 512 kB). NAND flash memory cells can only be directly written to when they are empty. If they are considered to contain data, the contents first need to be erased before a write operation can be performed reliably. In SSDs, a write operation can be done on the page-level, but due to hardware limitations, erase commands always affect entire blocks. As a result, writing data to SSD media is very fast as long as empty pages can be used, but slows down considerably once previously written pages need to be overwritten. Since an erase of the cells in the page is needed before it can be written again, but only entire blocks can be erased, an overwrite will initiate a read-erase-modify-write cycle: the contents of the entire block have to be stored in cache before it is effectively erased on the flash medium, then the overwritten page is modified in the cache so the cached block is up to date, and only then is the entire block (with updated page) written to the flash medium. This phenomenon is known as write amplification.

I wish I could vote multiple times. THIS would be one of those answers. That link has solved a worry I have had for a long time. Many thanks Hamish.
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Luis Alvarado♦Jun 6 '11 at 14:48

Interesting article from storagesearch.com. I wish it would give a date! So does the above answer mean that SSD owners don't need to bother with suggestions in the first answer, with the exception of TRIM? I don't have much need for file access times, but with 2G of memory, having a swap partition might still be useful when running some photo editing software along with several other memory-intensive programs like Chrome.
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lsidenDec 17 '12 at 2:00

@lsiden: the article does mention "Later:- in May 2008" part way through. And you are correct that you shouldn't worry about all the other stuff in the first article. Just enable TRIM and enjoy the speed :)
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Hamish DownerDec 19 '12 at 21:41

What is often pointed out is the right alignment of the partition. This should be equal to the block size of the SSD. Play safe and make your partitions aligned to MiB boundaries. Note that you can't do this with the Ubuntu installer's partition tool (which uses MB not MiB), but you can boot the live CD, use Gparted (which uses MiB), then click Install to use the partitions you set up.

The right scheduler:

A important point is the scheduler wich should be noop. You can set this scheduler via kernelparameter elevator=noop or via a entry echo noop > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler in you rc.local.

Mountflags:

I would recommend noatime and discard

Tmpfs

To put tmp on a ramdisk can increase the life time of the ssd.
To use this put the following line in you fstab: none /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0

Generally if you want to dive deeper into this topic I would recommend this excellent wiki-article.

Arch wiki mentions few preferable options for SSD file system - one of them is unstable, others are ext* ones. I assume ext4 is one of the best picks.
Note: In case of ext4 you may want to use discard mount option.

Consider switching from the default scheduler, which under most Linux distro's is cfq (completely fair queuing), to the noop or deadline scheduler for an SSD. Using the noop scheduler, for example, simply processes requests in the order they are received, without giving any consideration to where the data physically resides on the disk. This option is thought to be advantageous for SSDs since seek times are identical for all sectors on the SSD.

Without swap, and with /tmp in RAM, it's very easy to get to an out of memory situation, as a lot of programs use /tmp as a storage space (for example Brasero for storing DVD images).
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arrangeDec 9 '11 at 19:19

5

Not really. tmpfs by default is 10% of RAM. The size can be adjusted using size option though.
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Andrejs CainikovsDec 11 '11 at 21:54

Find the configuration file daemon, usually /etc/syslog.conf или /etc/rsyslog.d/ and all the paths of the form /var/log/ change by writing a minus sign ("-") in front of ways.
Before
mail.err /var/log/mail.err
After
mail.err -/var/log/mail.err

Format as ext4 during install, and create a small swap ~1 GB. After install edit fstab with sudo gedit /etc/fstab and add the following line

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

This will create a ramdrive for your temp files, which will lower the ageing. Also add noatime,nodiratime,discard to your ext4 line after defaults. This will also lower wear, and enable TRIM function. Save and reboot.

Thanks a lot. I am confused because I have always used dual boot Linux and it will be first time when I will be installing Linux on a fresh SSD, so the process and storage both are new to me. but it seems that it is same as installing Ubuntu on HDD, right?
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VarunApr 23 '12 at 22:33

It is the same. At install you might be asked to create the partition table, but that is one click.
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gajdipajtiApr 23 '12 at 22:36

Another question, Do I need to make any change to BIOS for my Dell laptop. I am going to install SSD and Ubuntu today?
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VarunApr 24 '12 at 13:15

I would not add this line to your fstab, var/tmp folder is meant to survive reboots, and that could cause issues for you.

tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

When I configure new system I leave all the tmp folder commented out this way if anything happens I can check the logs and stuff. Then once I have the main system setup I will un-comment them, but I never add the above line, here is what I use:

TRIM allows an operating system to inform an SSD which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally. Trimming enables the SSD to handle garbage collection overhead, which would otherwise significantly slow down future write operations to the involved blocks, in advance.1

In Ubuntu 14.04 a new feature has been added to the util-linux package that regularly trims SSDs automatically, but only Intel and Samsung SSDs have TRIM enabled by default, because some cheap SSDs can even brick themselves when running TRIM.2 The contents of /etc/cron.weekly/fstrim in Ubuntu 14.04:

#!/bin/sh
# call fstrim-all to trim all mounted file systems which support it
set -e
# This only runs on Intel and Samsung SSDs by default, as some SSDs with faulty
# firmware may encounter data loss problems when running fstrim under high I/O
# load (e. g. https://launchpad.net/bugs/1259829). You can append the
# --no-model-check option here to disable the vendor check and run fstrim on
# all SSD drives.
exec fstrim-all

I suggest to place only those things which are read at boot time on the SSD any maybe applications which require much time to load.Data and logs and other uncritical things I would locate on a normal HDD.Also you could setup your ubuntu to only load a big initramfs from SSD at boot time and not write back changes to ssd.This has the benefit, that changes to this partition are not persistent which is sth like a protection for your boot system.Therefor you would need much more RAM of course.

I would e.g. place the partitions
/, /etc, /usr, /boot, /lib 32/64 on SSD while sth like

The Linux kernel supports the TRIM function starting with version 2.6.33. The ext4 file system is supported when mounted using the "discard" parameter. The most recent disk utilities (and therefore installation software that make use of them) also apply proper partition alignment.

For backups there are many ways, simplest of which is (r)sync plus cron job.

Do you know what each of the locations are used for? All mentioned locations except for /root, /home and swap should be put on the SSD for speed because it's mostly read-only. For speed benefit, put /var on the SSD too.
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LekensteynDec 9 '11 at 17:44

Depends on what you intend to speed up and how big your SSD is. 120 GB should be enough, okay, but with smaller SSD you reach borders easily.
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Michael KDec 9 '11 at 17:47

The / partition for Kubuntu Oneiric takes 4.5GB on my SSD. 20GB is sufficient for / minus /home. The efforts for tweaking the filesystem layout, spreading it over several partitions is not worth it.
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LekensteynDec 9 '11 at 18:15